The increased interest for self-tracking through the use of technology has given birth to the Quantified Self movement. The movement empowers users to gain self-knowledge from their own data. The overall idea is fairly recent and as such it provides a vast space for exploration and research. This project contributes to the Quantified self movement by proposing a concept for visualization of personal data using an avatar. The overall work finds inspiration in Chernoff faces visualization and it uses parts of the presentation method within the project design.

This thesis presents a visualization approach for Quantified Self data using avatars. It tests the proposed concept through a user study with two iterations. The manuscript holds a detailed overview of the designing process, questionnaire for the data mapping, implementation of the avatars, two user studies and the analysis of the results. The avatars are evaluated using Spotify data. The implementation offers a visualization library that can be reused outside of the scope of this thesis.

The project managed to deliver an avatar that presents personal data through the use of facial expressions. The results show that the users can understand the proposed mapping of data. Some of the users were not able to gain meaningful insights from the overall use of the avatar, but the study gives directions for further improvements of the concept.

This chapter presents the activities and outcomes of the "People's Voices: Developing Cross Media Services to Promote Citizens Participation in Local Governance Activities" project.

The aims of the project were a) to identify and describe a number of cross media services that can be used to promote citizens’ participation in political decisions and civic activities, and b) to develop a conceptual design and a prototype system of such a service. The project included a number of field trips from Sweden to Uganda, and used participatory design and ethnographic techniques for requirements elicitation, actively involving the different stakeholders. The developed system allows people in Uganda to use their mobile phones to submit reports of irregularities in local governance or poor services delivery using an interactive voice menu interface.

We hope that our specific contribution will emphasize on how novel ways of integrating and using ICT can provide opportunities to encourage and facilitate civic engagement in North Uganda. The potential massive adoption of the kind of interactive mobile services described in this book chapter can be used in unique ways to provide opportunities to make governmental services more innovative, transparent and cost-effective, as well as to encourage citizens to become more engaged and goal-focused for the common good of their society.

In recent years, it is becoming more common for people to use applications or devices that keep track of their life and activities, such as physical fitness, places they visited, the music they listen to, or pictures they took. This generates data that are used by the service providers for a variety of (usually analytics) purposes, but commonly there are limitations on how the users themselves can also explore or interact with these data. Our position paper describes a new approach of visualizing such Quantified Self data, in a meaningful and enjoyable way that can give the users personal insights into their own data. The visualization of the information is proposed as an avatar that maps the different activities the user is engaged with, along with each such activity level, as graphical features. An initial prototype (both in terms of graphical design and software architecture) as well as possible future extensions are discussed.

Despite being explored and constantly improved through the years, onboarding of new hires in corporate organizations has remained a challenge. Many of the issues can be linked to a lack of communication between the organization and the new employee, as well as the common nature of these environments where information is spread across job titles and sources.

This thesis discusses the feasibility of implementing a basic chatbot that will allow new hires to ask questions and request varied information at all times, using an interface such as a messaging app. This research explores the way chatbots should be designed in order to be effective, reliable and enjoyable from a user experience perspective.

The chatbot was developed using the Chatfuel platform and tested by new employees at a corporate environment. The users were requested to explore the chatbot freely and then asked to answer a survey. The interactions were also recorded and analyzed from in both qualitative and quantitative ways (chat logs and analytics).

The study proves that an onboarding chatbot is a useful tool for new hires and can be used as a communication facilitator between the organization and the new hires during the first weeks of employment, and also after that, serving as an information source and a broadcasting method. The chatbot gives the new hires an accessible source of information that helps on the process of getting to speed, and enables a positive experience that increases familiarity in the new workplace.

When examining the boundaries and issues imposed by the traditional ways of learning, questions about the role that new technologies can play in eliminating these boundaries easily emerge. This thesis intends to shed light onto these issues and better understand the effectiveness of using new technologies to overcome pupils’ problems in learning mathematics.

The empirical study conducted involves investigating how touch features available on tablets can enhance children’s learning. The aim is to study the significance of touch features existing on tablets in helping young pupils learn mathematical concepts like timetables. So, the general question underlying this research is “what functionalities of tablet technologies are effective to enhance children’s learning and what barriers are there to more effective use of them?”

Although previous research has studied the role of tablets on pupils’ learning, less attention has been directed towards the study of the effect of touch-input functionality in tablets to facilitate children’s learning. This thesis wants to contribute to the topic by analyzing how a particular functionality available, the touch-input functionality, can be utilized to foster learning.

Teaching and learning the principles of wireless communication is a challenging issue mainly because it is difficult for students to translate the theoretical models that are commonly used in this area into practical knowledge. In order to address this challenge, we explore how to design and implement novel teaching and learning activities that integrate the principles of situated learning supported by mobile, positioning and web technologies. In this paper we present the results of our on-going efforts in this direction describing the rationale of our approach, an application supporting a learning activity designed under this approach and the outcomes of an evaluation we conducted with 28 engineering students. Obtained results show that the proposed approach offers the students new possibilities to combine theoretical and practical knowledge in a variety of collaborative situations in which mobile and web technologies played a central role.

In the last 16 years, more than 200 research articles were published about research-paper recommender systems. We reviewed these articles and present some descriptive statistics in this paper, as well as a discussion about the major advancements and shortcomings and an overview of the most common recommendation concepts and approaches. We found that more than half of the recommendation approaches applied content-based filtering (55 %). Collaborative filtering was applied by only 18% of the reviewed approaches, and graph-based recommendations by 16%. Other recommendation concepts included stereotyping, item-centric recommendations, and hybrid recommendations. The content-based filtering approaches mainly utilized papers that the users had authored, tagged, browsed, or downloaded. TF-IDF was the most frequently applied weighting scheme. In addition to simple terms, n-grams, topics, and citations were utilized to model users' information needs. Our review revealed some shortcomings of the current research. First, it remains unclear which recommendation concepts and approaches are the most promising. For instance, researchers reported different results on the performance of content-based and collaborative filtering. Sometimes content-based filtering performed better than collaborative filtering and sometimes it performed worse. We identified three potential reasons for the ambiguity of the results. (A) Several evaluations had limitations. They were based on strongly pruned datasets, few participants in user studies, or did not use appropriate baselines. (B) Some authors provided little information about their algorithms, which makes it difficult to re-implement the approaches. Consequently, researchers use different implementations of the same recommendations approaches, which might lead to variations in the results. (C) We speculated that minor variations in datasets, algorithms, or user populations inevitably lead to strong variations in the performance of the approaches. Hence, finding the most promising approaches is a challenge. As a second limitation, we noted that many authors neglected to take into account factors other than accuracy, for example overall user satisfaction. In addition, most approaches (81%) neglected the user-modeling process and did not infer information automatically but let users provide keywords, text snippets, or a single paper as input. Information on runtime was provided for 10% of the approaches. Finally, few research papers had an impact on research-paper recommender systems in practice. We also identified a lack of authority and long-term research interest in the field: 73% of the authors published no more than one paper on research-paper recommender systems, and there was little cooperation among different co-author groups. We concluded that several actions could improve the research landscape: developing a common evaluation framework, agreement on the information to include in research papers, a stronger focus on non-accuracy aspects and user modeling, a platform for researchers to exchange information, and an open-source framework that bundles the available recommendation approaches.

This study aims to find the answers to how an online interactive video editing tool for teachers to use would be designed. To find out the answers to this, students studying to become teachers and experienced teachers were interviewed and used for observations and usability testing of a prototype. In total there were 27 unique data gathering situations with 11 unique participants. The five teacher students who were participating were all teacher students at Linnaeus University in Växjö. The six experienced teachers have been teaching for many years and are currently lecturing teachers about new technology that can be used in the classroom. The result from interviews, observations and literature search contributed to a list of requirements which in turn became a prototype. What has been discovered is that teachers need a tool which is easy to use with interactions and functions such as adding clickable annotations to clips and creating playlists which will help teachers plan ahead and save time during lectures.

In recent years, mobile devices have become an integral part of our everyday life in various fields. The technology that powers them is used in various devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and PDAs. These devices hold extensive computation capabilities, along with advanced communication abilities, which are supported by an internet connection and diverse types of motion and location sensors. Mobile devices have changed the way people communicate with each other, for example by providing options to send instant text messages, perform live video calls with others in addition to voice conversations. These capabilities have encouraged educators to exploit mobile technology and promote new types of learning options. There are several new learning possibilities based on tools such as mobile dedicated applications, location-based learning activities, and interactive social related tasks. These new uses require adjustments to educational programs to allow support for this type of learning. The uniqueness of mobile learning, in contrast with the classic learning paradigm, is the ability to connect the learner through enhanced learning materials to the outside environment. This breaks the physical borders that exist in the traditional classroom and creates new learning possibilities, but it has its drawbacks. One of the difficulties that arise from this type of learning is the loss of contact in real time between teacher and student, especially when performing outdoor activities. The Treasure-HIT platform was conceived to create outdoor Treasure Hunt-based games, mainly for educational purposes, by introducing an authoring web platform and a supporting mobile application. The platform includes communication capabilities based on social interactions and cooperative learning with the integration of social networks, and yet real-time educator and student communication is still lacking. Adding real-time communication features provides a way to better support ongoing learning activities, and can take pressure off the learning process for the students, by providing them with a more personal experience and immediate support when needed. This thesis follows the process of addressing this concern in TreasureHIT, including the rationale, the background, the possible options and gradual development of a prototype solution to the problem under the existing Treasure-HIT infrastructure. In the thesis, the advantages of two features are explored: (1) the Realtime Group Tracking Map, which provides a way to monitor the movement and action of groups of players during game time, and (2) Instant Text Messaging service, which allows the game instructor to send custom text messages to the different game groups. The research findings indicate that the new monitoring options provide a solid tool for real-time analysis of the progress of the game and the ability to inform about various issues and solve them in real time. ii Furthermore, the instant message service feature received positive responses from the game-manager and players alike, on the grounds of major improvements to the general game flow and problem solving in real-time.

The latest developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) and its large penetration in different sectors of our society pose new challenges and demands in the field of education. This special issue entitled “Designing Nordic technology-enhanced learning (TEL)”, presents and discusses how researchers in the Nordic countries are currently framing and thinking about issues that are related to pedagogical design of learning spaces, digital literacies, educational professional development, design of tools engaging students in collaborative inquiry learning as well as design-oriented multimodal understandings of learning.

The objective pursued with the special issue has been to reflect upon current problems that educational institutions, practitioners and TEL researchers are facing in the Nordic countries as regards the acknowledgment of young people's ICT practices within formal education. Such analytical work has led us to identify and elaborate on what we believe constitute forthcoming research challenges for learning and education in the Nordic countries.

The role of public libraries is changing rapidly and the rise of open education creates opportunities for them to be hubs for lifelong learning. Alastair Creelman, blogger and e-learning analyst at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, examines some of the key current trends in net-based learning and discusses the future role of public libraries in this context.

The high penetration of Internet, advances in mobile computing and the rise of smartphone usage has largely enhanced the use of social media in education. Moreover, nowadays social learning network (SLN) platforms have become an important educational technology component in higher education. Despite the fact that SLN are becoming ubiquitous in the higher education, there is relatively not much empirical work done investigating their purposefulness when integrated into the learning activities. This paper aims at exploring the impact of SLN in mobile assisted learning and to provide empirical evidence as to what extent SLN and mobile learning (M-learning) can improve the learning experiences. For this purpose, a quantitative experimental approach is used, and two survey questionnaires were conducted. The data is collected from 120 participants. In this study, we focus our intention on Edmodo and Kahoot platforms, which represent social media based tools that aid and support collaboration, knowledge sharing and group activities among students. Computer science students of the Tetovo University (TU) used these tools throughout one semester. From this study, there is significant evidence that students are very interested to use this SLN in a M-learning setting, indicating that SLN can be one of the promising pedagogical technologies that could contribute effectively to learning process.

Current research in the Learning Sciences points out different methods and approaches to enhance and assist students in their learning and understanding of mathematical representations of the underlying physics of everyday situations. One of the aims of this paper is to address how mobile applications can be designed to support some of the pedagogical challenges associated with learners´ understanding of different graphical representations of motion – e.g. displacement as a function of time, velocity as a function of time, and how these couple to the actual motion, to each other, as well as to other mathematical representations of motion such as functions, equations and descriptive text. A prototype design is presented including a new type of application, or app, for mobile and in classroom use, using touch- and gesture based technology. One of the specific aims of this set of applications is to spur the learners exposure to, interaction with, as well as creation of multiple and multimodal representations of physical everyday phenomena involving motion, in a personal inquiry-based approach that could involve both informal as well as formal learning activities.

A prototype multimodal tablet application for learning the physics of motion has been developed tested and evaluated. By moving their finger across the screen the application enables the user to map its position and velocity in real-time in terms of graphs. The learning outcome of those test subjects using the application was compared to a group that did not use the application but had it shown to them, at the same time as getting an explanation of all the physics involved. There was a small but not significant difference in performance between these groups on a post-test. However, a larger (arguably significant) difference was seen between the male and female test subjects for the sub-set of questions of a more analytical nature. These were the questions targeted in this paper.

20. Exploring the Use of Augmented Reality to Support Science Education in Secondary Schools

During the last 2 years we have conducted several trials exploring how augmented reality and mobile technologies can be used to support learning and teaching in science education. In particular, we present the on-going efforts that are part of the EU funded project Science Center To Go. We provide an overview of the different activities, the lessons learned and what we propose as ways to forward making the technology, mobile, affordable and in the long term – ubiquitous available.

The paper presents the ranking algorithm by contacts with priority application for Social Communication Services. This algorithm makes it Possible to rank contacts in Different Social Communication Services by Their priority for the user, and find a preferable communication tools for everytime contact into the social graph. It Is Proposed to Determine Priorities Of The contacts Using communication history. The ranking algorithm is based on the Markov Chain Theory and Social Strength Calculation Approach. The paper exploits the Opportunities for measuring social strength for the contacts and also "prioritizes communication tools for Simplifying communication. The results are Lindsey village an example.

The field of virtual reality (VR) is getting increasing attention from the scientific community and it is being portrayed by advertisements as the user interface (UI) of the future. This is a fair statement since the prior uses of VR that used to exist only in fiction movies and books are now widely available in many forms and settings to the public. One of the most interesting outcomes from this technological evolution is that now VR can be experienced through the use of a mobile phone and the addition of some inexpensive means typically in a form of a headset. The combination of the phone’s screen as attached to the headset creates a form of Head Mounted Display (HMD) which can be utilized in order for the user to be immersed within a virtual environment (VE). The argument here is that even if the means to get access to VR are cheap, this should not be the case with the experience as well. On the contrary, the low entry requirements in combination with a high quality experience are the basis for the medium's success and further adoption by the users. More specifically, the capability of utilizing a three dimensional space (3D) should not limit the medium’s use on just that but instead, this space should be used in order to offer immersive environments which make the user feel as if he is there.

There are many factors that contribute to that result and significant progress has been made to some such as the quality of screen or other hardware parts that allow the user get immersed into the virtual scenery, however, little progress has been made towards the conceptual means that allow the user of better experiencing this VE. Most of the VR applications so far are specifically designed for a single user session. This creates an isolation of the user from any other type of communities which further increases the stigma of VR being a solitary experience. Another issue is the interaction method that is available to users in order to interact with the VE. The use of buttons in most of the available headsets is a counter intuitive method for a person to interact with an environment that wants to be called real. The technological advancements in the field of image processing have resulted in many new methods of interaction and multimodal manipulation within VE and it would be worthy of exploring their effects on the user experience (UX) when used as an interaction method.

For these reasons, this thesis used the case of VR games as a setting to study how UX can be enhanced from its current state by introducing a bare hand gesture interaction method and expanding the VR setting in order to host two users in shared VE. Two individual studies were conducted where user feedback was collected in order to describe the effects of this approach in both a qualitative and quantitative manner. As results indicate, by utilizing gesture analysis on a headset equipped with a smartphone, it is possible to offer a natural and engaging solution for VR interaction capable of rich UXs while maintaining a low entry level for the end users. Finally, the addition of another player significantly affected the experience by influencing the emotional state of the participants in the game and further enforcing their feeling of presence within the VE.

In this paper, we describe an approach for designing and developing technological solutions to support teachers in creating their own outdoor teaching activities. We elaborate on one particular case, TriGO, in which primary school students perform outdoor tasks to experience concepts and constructions in the field of mathematics. The application designs and an initial evaluation of the developed technological solutions is provided based on the results obtained from school activities performed with more than 10 teachers and 50 students.

28. Studying the impact of a mobile application in food waste reduction, circular economy, and social interaction inside the community.

Social and ecological sustainability applications are a significant way to bring equality, equity, and happiness in society. Food waste and food security are two of the most significant problems the people have to tackle the next years. In every country, there are huge problems regarding the food waste which cause serious health problems and pollution not only in the atmosphere but in the subsoil as well. Contrary to that, there is a countless number of people facing food security issues every day across the globe. These problems occurred in Greece as well due to the modern way of living on one hand and the financial crisis on the other. A combination of technological ideas in the economic field of the circular economy could be applied to succeed in sustainable solutions.

In this thesis, a literature search conducted in order to identify similar problems in Greece. There are very worrying statistics that indicate the massive food waste that is happening in Greek households. Additionally, the literature search for food security and unemployment reveals the significant problem occurred in society as a result of the financial crisis. An additional search in the field of the circular economy reveals excellent solutions in the agricultural machinery sharing and refactoring that could be applied locally, exploiting the existing infrastructure of the community. These solutions help small and young farmers to improve their financial situations. The author is exploring the effects of the financial crisis in the local economy in an effort to apply technological solutions in a form of a mobile application to interconnect people and make the donation, sharing and job search easier for the community. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop an application that could help the community to move towards social and ecological sustainability.

Even though the ideas applied in this thesis are fresh to the community in the author’s region, the results of this work indicate that there are significant support and willingness to contribute. The development efforts are focusing on a mobile application where its features are focusing on the best possible interconnection among people of the community. Participants believe that the application interconnection along with the features provided, like the food donation, food sales, machinery sharing and job search among people of the community, could bring positive results reducing the food waste, promoting the circular economy, and toning the local economy in general. The data have shown that the author is moving towards the right path in his first attempt to present these ideas to the community in his region. Every participant in this study embraces his efforts finding potential value in the provided features of the application.

Cultural events are of increasing importance as value creators in our society. They can serve to promote the attractiveness of a region, to increase social interactions and the quality of life and, not the least, to boost local economies. Today, a comprehensive and up-to-date online overview of cultural events in Småland, a region in southeastern Sweden, is missing mainly due the fact that information is distributed across different actors, communication channels and different media (e.g. individual organizers, commercial vendors, community calendars, newspapers calendars).

The ultimate purpose of our research is to significantly increase access to information and awareness of cultural attractiveness in Småland using innovative web technologies, both for its inhabitants as well as tourists. Reporting on the first stage of the project, this paper focuses on the exploration of requirements to design a mobile application and a website.

First guidelines for the design of web and mobile interfaces have been in existence since the early 2000s (Weiss, 2003) and have been updated accordingly to reflect the evolution of technology and the evolution of web and mobile applications. In order to get users to use the application or website, they need to be simple, easy to understand, and present meaningful information to the user (Rubino et al., 2014).

Functionalities for a cultural event app and/or website include those referring to general ones pertinent to any user-friendly app and specific ones related to information on cultural events. General major functionalities identified in the literature include:

Clear and concise way of displaying the content (Boiano et al., 2012);

Interactive and quick responding interfaces (ibid.);

An interface which is easy to understand with few controls (Gena et al., 2013);

The ability to share information, write reviews and connect, which in turn will make the application more visible for the general public (ibid.); and,

Utilising user-generated content (ratings, tags, comments, and so on) as a source of information about a user, and for adaptation and recommendation purposes (ibid.).

Our methodological approach involved three major steps. First, an interview with cultural events providers, using contemporary art as a use case, was conducted in order to identify initial needs and requirements for building the two types of interfaces. The interviews were conducted with two representatives of a governmental institution promoting contemporary art in the region, called Nya Småland (in English New Småland, http://www.nyasmaland.se/9/). After the first round of interviews, initial mock-ups of the interfaces were built, followed by another round of interviews to gain insights and feedback on those designs. Themes in the interviews focused on requirements, functionalities, cultural event providers in the different regions and user groups. The interviewees said that it is generally important to make contemporary art galleries and their activities visible to a wider audience through a good-quality app and a web site. It is often hard to reach the public with cultural events; one reason could be lack of money for advertising. The information gathered from the interviews was then used when creating a new round of refined mock-ups.

In conclusion, the interviewees consider a quality app and a website for cultural events on contemporary art an important way in which to increase visibility of cultural events in the region and beyond. In addition, preserving information about past events for future uses is considered important, especially for journalists, politicians and journalists. Future research efforts will focus on developing an interactive prototype and gain feedback from content providers and a range of potential end user groups.

Food waste is considered to be a big problem worldwide. Different research projects have been done within this area in order to find ways that can help reduce this problem. This thesis addresses the problem of food waste in the supermarkets of Kosovo, by identifying the amounts of food waste in 3 supermarkets of this region. In addition, it explores the possibility of connection between supermarkets and charity organizations by using a developed prototype that corresponds to the field of web technologies. The prototype is implemented based on the feedback of supermarket workers. Interviews with open-ended questions were realized with supermarket workers and charity organization workers in order to identify the best medium that can be used to connect them. The prototype is realized using Wordpress, and evaluated first using the SUS questionnaire. Furthermore, it is also evaluated by performing usability test with supermarket and charity organization workers. The participants were asked to perform different tasks during the evaluation. The study shows that the use of the developed prototype reduces the amount of food waste in supermarkets. Furthermore, it successfully connects charity organizations with supermarkets. In addition, it provides a new way of controlling expiry dates of items resulting in reduction of waste inside supermarkets.

The VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems inReality) Open Lab Platform is an architecture that enableuniversities, secondary schools, and other organizations to openinstructional laboratories for remote access with preservedcontext. VISIR emanates from a feasibility study made in 1999 atBTH (Blekinge Institute of Technology) in Sweden. Today,VISIR laboratories are online at seven universities globally wherethousands of students can work and conduct most experimentsthat can be performed on a solderless breadboard remotelywithout any risk of being harmed. IAOE (InternationalAssociation of Online Engineering has organized SIG VISIR aSpecial Interest Group for VISIR. Further development of theplatform is carried out in this Community. This paper is aboutwork in progress especially at BTH.

Reducing the use of energy is important for several reasons, such as saving money and reducing impact on the climate. However, the awareness among non-experts of how much energy is required by different activities is generally low, which can lead to wrong prioritizations. In this study, we have developed an interactive tool to increase “energy awareness”. A group of 58 students first did a test to benchmark their current energy awareness, then tried the tool for 10 min, and then did the same test immediately after trying the prototype and one week after trying the prototype. In addition, they answered questions regarding which, if any, of the energy requirement of different activities surprised them, any thoughts about their own energy use aroused after using the prototype and what they thought about using the tool compared to more conventional methods of learning. The results showed a significant learning effect in energy awareness with a very strong effect size of 1.689, that they were most surprised by the energy required to produce a hamburger, 39 of 58 explicitly said they intended to change one or more aspects in order to improve their energy use, where 24 actions involved changing habits and 18 actions was of a one-time investment character. The attitude towards using such a tool instead of more conventional learning was very good and the words most frequently used to describe the tool was good, simple and easy to use, fun, and interesting, but five users also said they were bored after a while. In total the results indicate that using an interactive tool like this even for a limited time is a good way to in an efficient and fun way increase energy awareness.

Reducing the use of energy is important for several reasons, such as saving money and reducing impact on the climate. However, the awareness among non-experts of how much energy is required by different activities and appliances is generally low, which can lead to wrong prioritizations. In this study, we have developed an interactive tool to increase “energy awareness”, and performed a longitudinal study to evaluate its effect. A group of 58 students first did a test to benchmark their current energy awareness, where their current knowledge of energy used for 14 different activities, such as driving vehicles and using home appliances, was measured. They then tried the interactive learning tool for 10 min. Next, they did the same test immediately after trying the tool, then again one week after trying the tool, and finally again six months after trying the tool. The results showed a significant learning effect in energy awareness with a “huge” effect size of 2.25 immediately after the intervention, a “very large” effect size of 1.70 after one week, and a “large” effect size of 0.93 after six months. The results further showed that the respondents consistently underestimated what 100 kWh could be used for, and especially so for appliances and activities requiring little energy. Before the intervention, on average they underestimated how much 100 kWh could be used for by 95.2%, and six months after the intervention the underestimation was 86.8%.

This paper presents a prototype that facilitates the work of Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) by providing an Android mobile device application that allows the therapist to focus on the patient rather than taking notes during exercises.Each physical object used by the therapist in those exercises can be given digital properties using Near Field Communication (NFC) tags. The registration does not require a high level of ICT skills from the therapists. SLTs often use such objects in non-technology driven exercises that deal with classification, seriation and inclusion. The application offers such exercises developed in close collaboration with two SLTs, and our aim was to provide therapists with a way to efficiently record activities while working with a patient using a mobile application. The tool was validated through several expert reviews, a usability study as well as a trial with a patient in Paris, France.

Extremely catastrophic situations are rare in Sweden, which makes training opportunities important to ensure competence among emergency personnel who should be actively involved during such situations. There is a requirement to conceptualize, design, and implement an interactive learning environment that allows the education, training and assessment of these catastrophic situations more often, and in different environments, conditions and places. Therefore, to address these challenges, a prototype system has been designed and developed, containing immersive, interactive 360-degrees videos that are available via a web browser. The content of these videos includes situations such as simulated learning scenes of a trauma team working at the hospital emergency department. Various forms of interactive mechanisms are integrated within the videos, to which learners should respond and act upon. The prototype was tested during the fall term of 2017 with 17 students (working in groups), from a specialist nursing program, and four experts. The video recordings of these study sessions were analyzed and the outcomes are presented in this paper. Different group interaction patterns with the proposed tool were identified. Furthermore, new requirements for refining the 360-degrees interactive video, and the technical challenges associated with the production of this content, have been found during the study. The results of our evaluation indicate that the system can provide the students with novel interaction mechanisms, to improve their skills, and it can be used as a complementary tool for the teaching and learning methods currently used in their education process.

Extreme catastrophe situations are rare in Sweden, which makes training opportunities important to secure the competence among emergency personnel that should be actively involved during those situations. There is a need to conceptualize, design and implement interactive learning environments that allow to educate, train and assess these catastrophe situations more often and in different settings, conditions and places. In order to address these challenges, a prototype system has been designed and developed containing immersive interactive 360 degrees educational videos that are available via a web browser. The content of these videos includes simulated learning scenes of a trauma team working at the hospital emergency department. Different types of interaction mechanisms are integrated within the videos in which learners should act upon and respond. The prototype was tested during the fall term 2017 with 17 students from the specialist nursing program, and four medical experts. These activities were assessed in order to get new insights into issues related to the proposed approach and feedback connected to the usefulness, usability and learnability of the suggested prototype. The initial outcomes of the evaluation indicate that the system can provide students with novel interaction mechanisms to improve their skills and it can be applied as a complementary tool to the methods used currently in their education.

This thesis has taken part as an experimental development within the Learning Ecology through Science with Global Outcomes project. It introduces the area of cross platform mobile application development and provides a possible solution for tackling the current fragmentation of mobile devices and platforms for data collection. During the process, a mobile data collection prototype was designed, implemented and deployed on Android, iOS and Windows Mango by using standards and web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, XForms and JavaScript. The deployed prototype was then tested with users in order to collect the necessary data to help answer the questions that were formulated. The results indicate an ease of use of the prototype in relation to cross platform development and also shows potential benefits such as less code and time. Cross platform development provides a way to counteract the current fragmentation between mobile platforms.

The internet based social network has been applied to serve many social functions, such as democratic decision making, knowledge sharing, education, and healthcare. In this paper, we provide a prototype of virtual community designed for home-based chronic diseases healthcare. We studied the concept “community” from the activity theory model in order to design the prototype with a solid theoretical base. Then we conducted a questionnaire from healthcare recipients and interviewed healthcare providers to gather the requirements for the design of the community. With some user stories we described the requirements as use cases for our design and a conceptual prototype is built based on the requirements. This virtual community servers as a shared platform for all the stakeholders who are engaged in the healthcare activity. With this shared community platform, the interoperability problems of current healthcare systems can be moderated.

The rise of pervasive computing presents unique opportunities due to increasing availability of smart devices such as mobile phones and tablets equipped with various sensors enabling Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies. The growth of mobile computing has led to an increase in access to digital music. With the growth of digital music, the development of music information sharing services for users becomes important. The existing sharing methods are based on the users’ social network and preferences in music. However, sometimes, sharing music according to location and time is needed.This paper presents work on smart spaces equipped with NFC tags, deployed at different locations in hallways for discovering and sharing new music experiences. This concept provides a new way of interaction between passers-by for discovering music in relation to location. For example, the hallway locations use sensing devices to provide an automatic means of exchanging music information among the passers-by.We utilized NFC tags as Music-Relay hot spots. The hot spot retrieves information about the music a user is playing on her/his device while s/he is passing by the hot spot. The work contributes to a pervasive service that equips an environment with music context intelligence about a passer-bys choice of music and allows users to feel the musical presence of other users who have been in the same location at previous point in time. In general, this paper proposes a new music information sharing service using the music information captured from users at a specific location in time.

Many online learning websites and learning management systems (LMS) provide social collaboration and networking tools to aid learning and to interact with peers for knowledge sharing. The benefit of collaborating with each other is certainly undeniable, such tools, however, can be a distraction from the actual tasks for learners. The paper presents a study on social media tools supported by various eLearning systems to understand the impact on students learning activities. A survey questionnaire is designed for this purpose. The data is collected from students who have had experience using different massive open online course (MOOC) eLearning platforms and LMS from various universities. The results of the survey indicate that more than 95Â % of the participants use at least one of the social tools in their daily life activities, and almost 84Â % of them have used these tools in connection with the eLearning systems. It is also interesting to note that 92Â % of the participants intend to use social tools for study purposes. The results indicate that there is a need to integrate more of these social media tools into eLearning systems.

Communication is a fundamental social component of human life and constitutes an indispensable factor in the learning process as it allows the transfer of information between people. Communication supports the interactions that take place in different learning stages and settings and can encourage involvement and cooperation. The "Treasure-HIT" platform, a dedicated environment for designing pedagogical mobile location-based games, encourages social interaction and collaborative learning. This platform, which is social at its base, has limited communication capabilities. Adding such capabilities can overcome this difficulty by providing a more supportive and interpersonal interaction among the involved stakeholders. This thesis explores the users' communication needs for the preparation and enactment of "Treasure-HIT" activities. A design based research was used to analyze the needs in terms of design and technological specifications and develop and implement communication features. Three such features were developed in the course of this thesis: (1) Activities based map, (2) Social media sharing feature (Facebook tasks) and (3) Image gallery. All of those aimed at supporting communication between learners, instructors and their community, before, during and after the activities. Findings show that the developed capabilities enabled new means of communication and contributed to the user experience and learning process. Users appreciated the functionality and ease of use and positively adopted the new features.

There is an apparent problem with children being abused in different ways in their everyday life and the lack of education related to these issues among working adults in the vicinity of these children, for example as social workers or teachers. There are formal courses in child interview training that teach participants how to talk to children in a correct manner. Avatar-mediation enables new methods of practicing this communication without having to involve a real child or role play face-to-face with another adult. In this study it was explored how a system could be designed in order to enable educational practice sessions where a child interview expert can be mediated through avatars in the form of virtual children. Prototypes were developed in order to evaluate the feasibility of the scenario regarding methods for controlling the avatar and how the avatar was perceived by the participants. It was found that there is a clear value in the educational approach of using avatar-mediation. From the perspective of the interactor it was found that using a circular radial interface for graphical representation of different emotions was possible to control a video-based avatar while simultaneously having a conversation with the participant. The results of the study include a proposed design of an interface, description of underlying system functionality and suggestions on how avatar behavior can be characterized in order to achieve a high level of presence for the participant.

Gathering statistics in sports is a tool to provide useful information to different parties such as trainers, club executives and spectators. They have in some instances also become mandatoryas a part of a national association. In order to provide a digital tool to improve the gathering for one such club, a web-based prototype was developed. This prototype was based on specifications outlined by an ice hockey club in the Swedish Allsvenskan division and on previous research on mobile devices. It was tested in two iterations. The result of the tests indicates that a digital, platform independent software not only helps greatly reduce the workload but also provides new abilities and benefits for the clubs.

This study examines the factors that can facilitate navigation pattern forinexperienced users of mobile applications for the creation of a mobilegraphical interface. In this study, the navigation is created with the help ofclick surfaces in the graphical interface, which can cause usability problemson small screens.A qualitative study has been made and two methods used are Card Sortingand user testing that included interviews and observations. The Card Sortingmethod allowed users to organize and structure the contents of the system ina way that seemed appropriate for them. How the users chose to structure thecontents was then helpful when the system was created. Interviews andobservations were then made with the users while they tested the system.This was done with five test persons four times during the course ofdevelopment to have the users involved in the development process.The results of this studie are presented with different methods of how tocreate useful navigation in mobile interfaces. A prototype for a payroll andtime reporting system was created based on the literature search and based onthe results of the survey user testing.This study shows that it is difficult to make a mobile website useful to allthose who will use it, but to implement certain aids can increase the usabilityfor many users. The study conducted in this work shows that some importantfactors in the creation of mobile applications is to use large clicks surfaces,use the full screen, and to constantly give users feedback.